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I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.

Vijay Prashad

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Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Understand
Place
Take
Uprisings
Important
Uprising
Spontaneity
Politically
Preparation
Combination

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

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The United States is facing serious pushback from Turkey, which is not comfortable with the view that the Islamic State is a terrorist organization.
Vijay Prashad
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Leadership is another word for preparation.
Vijay Prashad
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The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.
Vijay Prashad
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I think a far more important strategic way to deal with the Islamic State would be to bring some of these regional partners and explain to them that Turkey's own contradictory foreign policy has to end. I mean, if United States is serious, it has leverage over Turkey. And apparently it has not been able to move Turkey sufficiently.
Vijay Prashad
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However you define territorial ambitions, it need not be a country that's right next to the U.S. for it to exercise its extraterritorial or territorial ambitions.
Vijay Prashad
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Mr. Obama at the UN said that the large nations should not trample small ones in pursuit of what he called territorial ambition. These are curious statements coming from the American president at this time.
Vijay Prashad
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To be a Communist or to be somebody who believes in the future is a curious thing. So you have to live with people around you, you have to be with the people.
Vijay Prashad
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Organizing is always a relationship between the person who arrives and says 'Let's meet together' and the person who comes to the meeting.
Vijay Prashad
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There are cultures that produce different kinds of attitudes, whether it's religion, fatalism, sense of fear, repression, the culture of God and the police minimizes confidence in people.
Vijay Prashad
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There are several studies done of peasant uprisings where the first chapter might be 'conditions in that area' and so the conditions are bad, and then the second chapter is a kind of conjectural event, somebody's shot and then there's an uprising. But there's no consideration, no chapter on preparation.
Vijay Prashad
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People who become important activists, they also struggle with the process of discovery.
Vijay Prashad
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Mr. Obama needs to make a phone call to Ankara and have a serious conversation about why the current government in Turkey isn't going to seal its border, why it doesn't take a stronger position against the Islamic State.
Vijay Prashad
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The best intentions (of respect and tolerance) can often be annoying to those whose cultures are not in dominance: we feel that we are often zoological specimens.
Vijay Prashad
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People were, in good faith perhaps, writing history books about the Indian working class, Indian peasantry, et cetera, and at no point did Communists make an entry, not even to be criticized. They were essentially being whitewashed from history.
Vijay Prashad
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There's a right-wing shift in Israeli society, very hard right shift.
Vijay Prashad
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Interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you've actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don't necessarily see red flags everywhere.
Vijay Prashad
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You see often it's not ideas, it's inertia, it's bureaucratism, it's all the other things that sometimes come in the way of a good idea.
Vijay Prashad
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There's a different use for different strategies.
Vijay Prashad
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In times when the tempo for struggle is not very high, you prepare populations by conducting acts of courage-building, confidence-building, respect for each other. That's what the preparation is about and it requires leadership.
Vijay Prashad
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We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.
Vijay Prashad